This is a friendly discussion among brothers and sisters who all love the Book of Mormon and believe it is actual history. We seek unity on how to interpret the text and Church history. This blog focuses on the North American setting as the simplest and best explanation of Book of Mormon geography, with Cumorah in New York, but we recognize other settings are meaningful for other people.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Ask Gramps has Mesomania

In the last post I noted that AskGramps forgot to mention Letter VII. That was an answer given in 2008. Back then, hardly anyone knew about Letter VII because LDS scholars have suppressed it. You can't even find it mentioned on lds.org.*

Some people object when I say LDS scholars have suppressed Letter VII, but you can look at FairMormon and all the publications by BYU Studies, FARMS/Maxwell Institute, and the rest, and you won't find it mentioned anywhere.

To their credit, BookofMormonCentral have put it in their archive, but then they repudiate it with their KnoWhys. Their affiliates uniformly reject Letter VII, although they do it so obliquely that no one seems to notice.

So it's no wonder AskGramps never heard of it.

Whether ignorance is a defense is up to you, the reader, but in 2014, AskGramps pulled a full Mesomania and outright declared there are two Cumorahs!

The "two-Cumorahs" theory was developed by RLDS scholars in the 1920s. LDS scholars embraced the theory over the objection of Joseph Fielding Smith, and now AskGramps is relaying it to new generations. http://askgramps.org/hill-cumorah-really-new-york/

I bring this up because I still meet a lot of LDS members who have no idea that our LDS scholars are promoting the two-Cumorahs theory, thereby undermining the credibility and reliability of Oliver Cowdery, Joseph Smith, and David Whitmer.

IMO, AskGramps out to reconsider repeating the Mesomania-inspired theories of current LDS scholars. (Needless to say, I think the scholars should reconsider their theories, but that seems highly unlikely, given their years of allegiance to the two-Cumorahs theory. See the Mesomania book and blog for my thoughts on why this is.)

Check out what AskGramps has to say:

There are two Hill Cumorahs. Both of which were depositories of records of the Nephites. Unfortunately because the name and purpose are the same, it is very easy to confuse the two and assume that people are talking about one when they mean the other.

The first hill is the one which the Book of Mormon references and held the records that Mormon used to compile the Golden Plates near the end of the Nephite civilization. We don’t know exactly where this is, although somewhere in Mexico is a standard guess. The final war of the Nephites was fought near this Cumorah.

Moroni survived the war and had the charge to protect his father’s abridgment of the Nephite record (aka the Golden Plates). We don’t know how long Moroni lived afterwards. We do know from his record that Moroni was alone and hunted. He feared that if he was caught by the Lamanites he would be killed and the record destroyed. With that as a possible consequence, it seems very unlikely that he would risk returning to the lands ruled by the Lamanites.

Moroni did not record the length of his journey or where he traveled. He had limited space left on the plates and devoted that for things he thought would be more important to us.

The next record we have is Joseph Smith’s account of the angel Moroni’s visit. Joseph Smith was told by the angel Moroni that he had buried them in a nearby hill in New York. This means that the most likely way they got there was that Moroni traveled for years, alone and on the run, as the Lord guided him to the correct spot. Now how did this second hill get to be called Cumorah? I don’t know, but from what we see of the naming conventions in the Book of Mormon, it wouldn’t be all that hard to believe that Moroni would call the second hill in which the records were stored the same name as the first one, no matter the years and miles separating them.

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As long as we're talking about two-Cumorahs, you won't be surprised to learn that AskGramps has also signed on to the volcano nonsense.

About Me

I like the way Daft Punk wear robot suits in public. I'd rather focus on the music than the personalities. Same with Internet discussions; I'd rather focus on the information and the logic of the arguments than the personalities. That said, people want to know I'm a real person, so here's a photo of me at the UN in New York.

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